Humans and Oceans: Survival Strategies
Marine Reserves: Living Local
In The Bahamas, you rely on the water for your survival more than the land,” says Tarah McDonald, a student at the College of The Bahamas. “We tell people to come to this country by showing them the water. It’s also something that Bahamians are very protective of.” For several months of 2004, McDonald joined Sunday services in towns across the Exumas, a string of islands in the center of the Bahamian archipelago. Church seemed to be the best place to find what McDonald was after: folks willing to chat about their community and their connection to the sea. She asked them when they first learned to fish, what, where, and how much they caught, sold, cooked, and ate, how their forebears did things differently, and dozens of other questions.
Discarded conch shells are common in The Bahamas. Some ancient piles, called middens, are thousands of years old and yield clues on historical settlements and species abundance.
McDonald also wanted the locals’ frank opinions about the marine reserve located in the northern part the Exuma chain, the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park. For nearly 20 years, the park has been designated a “no-take” marine protected area in an effort to both preserve wilderness and revive adjacent fisheries. Nothing dead or alive can be removed from the park: no coral, no plants, no shells, not even sand. And definitely no fish.
Fishing supports residents all over the 700 Bahamian islands (in 1997, it earned the country $62.7 million), but even more so in the less-accessible “Out Islands” like the Exumas. Out Islands are any island other than the country’s two most populated, New Providence and Grand Bahama. An Out Island community, called a settlement, may consist of only 300 people, or 150, or even 50. In total, the Exumas have just 3,500 residents. Most fish for subsistence and income, or they work in tourism.
“When you tell people they now can’t fish in an area, you are impacting their livelihood, and they have to know why,” says Jessica Minnis, chair of the College of The Bahamas’ School of Social Sciences. “You can’t put a marine protected area in a region without having input from the people who live there.” Minnis is one of a small group of social scientists who are assessing the islands’ culture and economics as part of the Bahamas Biocomplexity Project, a five-year interdisciplinary study of marine reserves in the country. The project is both assessing the success of the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park so far and preparing for the future, as the government is planning a patchwork of reserves that may make 20 percent of The Bahamas “no-take.” The socioeconomic data will be used to decide on exact boundaries and management of future parks that hopefully will help them meet both conservation and social goals.
The degree to which social research is being integrated with biophysical research in the Bahamas Biocomplexity Project is groundbreaking for scientific studies of marine reserves. It’s a new trend that makes sense: Since ecosystems involve inextricably linked natural and human components, investigating them holistically is the only way to understand how they function. Marine protected areas also have a better chance of achieving their goals when planners and resource managers understand how residents and visitors respond to them.
A Culture Forged by the Sea
Steve Ferguson Bodie is an Exuman fisherman who trolls the cays’ reef-dotted waters with a rod and reel almost daily. He catches snappers, grunts, porgy, queen conch, silvery-blue bonefish, and the prize specimen of the Bahamas: Nassau grouper, a 5 kilogram, boldly striped fish with a sizeable underbite. “We sell the snappers and groupers to the fish fry restaurants,” says Bodie. “That is something that puts a few dollars in the pocket.” A quarter-century ago, when he was a kid, he’d fish every day after school for fun with a hand-pulled line from shoreline rocks or at a fishing hole that was a guarded family secret for generations. According to Bodie, most Exumans still forgo a spin reel for a line pulled by hand. You can feel the nibble better.
